Torah, “Deuteronomy,” 1:44 – 1:45: And the Amorites, dwelling in that mountain, came out towards you and pursued you as bees do, and beat you down in Seir, as far as Hormah. So you returned and wept before the Lord, but the Lord would not hear your voice, nor would He listen to you.

The connection with the Creator, i.e., with the force of Light, is very simple: If you are equivalent to Him you can connect to Him, and never otherwise.

There are no movements from the side of the Light, it is in absolute rest, and only we move toward it. But it seems to us that the Light is getting closer and then we feel good, and if we are opposite to the Light, we are moving away from it, and then we feel bad.

We think that the Light, the common force of good that fills the entire universe, performs all the actions, but in reality everything depends only on our internal movement.

By connecting more strongly with each other, we reveal the Light within us more and more. Egoism constantly supplies us with bigger desires so we can correct ourselves by getting closer to each other, until the complete revelation of the Upper Light is within us.

Question: Would it be an error to think that I will do everything by myself?

Answer: Of course. The fact is that we go forward without the Light, the entire development of humanity before our time was through the attempts to do something inside egoism. We were enclosed in our little black ego and all the time we were digging in the depths of the earth, ostensibly seeking to progress.

But the entire progress came down to robbing, stealing, and appropriating something from each other. It never took place due to good ideas or kind actions. Therefore, now we are left with nothing.

We have come to such a state because as the Creator said, “I am not among you.” After all, Moses, or the Creator, is the quality of bestowal (Bina).

Today, we finally begin to uncover the reason for our common universal suffering. Its source is the fact that humanity is in one single quality of egoism. And we don’t have the second opposite to it, the quality of altruism. Even the altruism we think exists in this world is purely egoistic.[183996]From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 1/20/16

Torah, “Deuteronomy,” 1:41 – 1:43: Then you answered and said to me, “We have sinned against the Lord; we will go up and fight, according to all that the Lord, our God, has commanded us.” So every one of you girded his weapons, and you prepared yourselves to go up to the mountain.And the Lord said to me, “Say to them, ‘Neither go up nor fight, for I am not among you, lest you be struck down before your enemies.'”So I spoke to you, but you did not listen, and you rebelled against the command of the Lord, and you acted wickedly and went up to the mountain.

Moses says to the sons of Israel, “You weren’t corrected enough in order to fight with your internal egoism. I warned you but you decided nevertheless that we need to race against time.

Remark: But they repented by saying, “We have sinned against the Lord! Now we will go and correct our sin.” And God replied, “I am not among you.”

Answer: We can’t get away, the laws of nature are unalterable. God is not some kind of puppet or capricious woman. It is the clear laws of nature. If you fulfill them, you receive life; if you don’t fulfill them you are going to die.

Moreover, he sent spies, the wisest men, to the land of Israel. And what did they see? They saw the enormous fruits this land gives! And why does it give such fruits? There are no Jews there yet, completely different people live there. However, they can’t extract these fruits from the egoism without having quality of bestowal.

Comment: But in the Torah it is said that two people are carrying an enormous cluster of grapes…

Answer: Correct, but who is carrying it? The children of Israel that entered it; the seven spies, they saw these fruits! They brought them to the people! They work with egoism! They discovered that with its help it is possible to obtain such fruits, i.e., to reach such spiritual heights!

Therefore they say, “If we enter this land, (plunge into egoistic desires), take a bit from inside egoism and raise it outside, then we will receive enormous fruits! This is special land!”

There are few levels of desires: zero, one, two, three, and four. The fourth level is the most base, heavy, and egoistic. Throughout the history of evolution, egoism is constantly growing. The people of Israel, by exiting Babylon, corrected the first four levels of egoism in them: zero, one, two, and three.

And now they enter the land of Israel, the last, most terrible egoistic state. Therefore, the spies who entered the fifth level, bring fruits and show them to everyone, saying, “Look what we can obtain there!”

But everybody understands that these fruits are possible to obtain through a serious fight with terrible giants living in the land of Israel, i.e., with those enormous egoistic desires that exist in this level.

Moses addresses the people saying, “We must work on this level. Do you agree?” Half of them shout, “What for? Here it is good for us as well! We will wait.” And another part is ready to go forward at any cost. Hence Moses tells the Creator that he must explain the Torah to them again.

But this is another Torah, preparation for entry into the land of Israel; we can say it is a compilation or an assembly of the previous path and a presentation in a form that requires a person to start working with the most difficult and dark layer of egoism.

Among these egoistic desires are some that we are unable to correct and just have to leave them aside. But first we need to explore, sort, select, and set them aside.

Seven nations living in the land of Israel, i.e., seven egoistic desires, must be corrected gradually. This means conquering them by covering them with the altruistic intention.[183905]From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 1/20/16

Question: How do we deal with the loss of a loved one? It is impossible to accept that a person was here right now and suddenly he is gone. The mind doesn’t agree with the fact that our life is temporary. Death seems unreal to us.

Answer: Doesn’t this attitude indicate that our perception is limited, that we are naive, immature, and lacking the understanding of our condition? We are not able to perceive life and death.

Apparently, we are able to perceive just a tiny fragment of our life, like little children, and we don’t know what is really happening in it. An encounter with death plunges us into shock, when someone was living and suddenly disappears. We look at a lifeless body and are astonished that this is not a human anymore, not a friend, not a relative. There was a person and now he is gone. How is it possible?

This person lived in me, was imprinted in my qualities, desires, feelings, and memory. And suddenly he disappeared. How is it possible that a person ceases to exist? Our mind can’t perceive it. And the problem is probably not reality itself, because nothing is eternal in this world. The problem is in our limited perception that is able to see only to the threshold of death.

Why is life arranged this way? Why is a person placed in a limited body that occupies a very small volume in reality? We attach great importance to this body, much higher and more significant than is due a physical body situated on the animal level.

We are used to the temporality of our existence and live very well with it. And not because we are not depressed with this knowledge. But because we live in and can’t see beyond this life, we are reconciled with the understanding of our mortality and console ourselves by masking these questions, convincing ourselves that this is life.

Humanity invents religions and beliefs that tell about the afterlife. People believe them for lack of choice because it is still some compensation for the impermanence of life that suddenly stops.

But in fact, this question requires a much more mature attitude. We can look beyond the boundary of life and death, beyond the borders of this tiny reality that we see around us now.

Would we be able to see reality on a higher level, i.e., stop perceiving it as animals that perceive everything only through their bodily senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch? Would we develop new, out of body organs of perception that are outside of our material body, its animal degree?

The wisdom of Kabbalah explains all this, which is why it is called the “science of perception,” as “Kabbalah” means “reception.”

Kabbalah helps us to open our eyes and see the real, wider reality right here and now, not after the death of the physical body.[183787]From KabTV’s “A New Life” 5/5/16

Torah, “Deuteronomy,” 01:39 – 01:40: [Moreover] your little ones, whom you said will be prey, and your children, who on that day did not know good and evil, they will go there and I will give it to them, and they will possess it. But as for you, turn yourselves around and journey into the desert by way of the Red Sea.

Children born during the journey in the desert will be able to enter the land of Israel because they weren’t in Egyptian slavery, in the slavery of egoism. They fought with it!

In other words, those altruistic qualities that were born from the corrected ego are ready to enter the land of Israel and work with egoism further by ploughing it, and those qualities that were in the slavery of Pharaoh are screaming constantly, “Let’s return to Egypt!” and therefore they must die.

The children will not be the prey of giants because they will be above them, above this egoistic power that is revealed in the land of Israel. This is the next stage after rising to Bina, the work with Malchut, with the common enormous egoism that is represented by giants.[183902]From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 1/20/16

Midrash Rabah, “Devarim,” 04:1 – 04:2: Moses asked, “Allow me to repeat Torah from the beginning to the Jews before my death! I want to explain to them all difficult places and details of the laws of the Torah!”

Moses can’t enter the land of Israel because we enter it in order to conquer it, and Moses is on the level of pure Bina, absolute bestowal. Therefore, all his work ends in the interval from Egypt to the receiving of the Torah and its development.

The sons of Israel passed the first period of learning the Torah and its adaptation while wandering in the desert for forty years. They die during these years, meaning all the egoism with which they exited Egypt dies in them and gets fully corrected to bestowal.

Now they need to work with this quality in order not just to rise above all egoistic desires but to convert them into altruistic ones. Like a farmer in ploughing the earth, turns it over, allowing new shoots to come up, the same thing happens here.

And Moses is not ready for this. This isn’t his force, but the use of the lower egoistic quality, of the land of Israel that isn’t the land of Israel yet. It will become the land of Israel once it is conquered.[183868]From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 1/20/16

In the News (International Business Times): “British physicist Stephen Hawking has said that there is no God and that computers will overtake humans within the next century. The 73 year old dismissed any notion that there is a God in an interview by stating that science is able to explain the origination of everything.

“When asked by Spanish newspaper El Pais if scientists should believe in God, Hawking responded: ‘I use the word, God, in an impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature.’ This question was followed by: ‘Do you think humans would one day abandon religion and God?’ to which he retorted: ‘The laws of science are sufficient to explain the origin of the universe. It is not necessary to invoke God.’

“…[He] went on to say that the future of the human race could be bleak. He said that if aliens come to Earth, they could take over our planet. Hawking: ‘Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach. To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.’

“On the subject of artificial intelligence (AI), he added: ‘Computers will overtake humans with AI at some point within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.

“‘I think the survival of the human race will depend on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe, because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth. I therefore want to raise public awareness about the importance of space flight. I have learnt not to look too far ahead, but to concentrate on the present. I have so much more I want to do.’”

My Comment:The wisdom of Kabbalah could be very useful for all scientists; they wouldn’t need to suffer for generations asserting hypotheses and then refuting them. Instead they could just discover the nature of God.[170921]

In the News (Tel Aviv University ): “Most of us think that friendship is a two-way street — but that’s true only half the time, according to research from Tel Aviv University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Their new joint study says only half of your buddies would consider you their own friend. People have a very poor perception of friendship ties, and this limits their ability to influence their “friends,” according to the research, published in PLoS One on March 22, 2016. …

“‘It turns out that we’re very bad at judging who our friends are,’ says Dr. Erez Shmueli, who conducted the study with Dr. Laura Radaelli, both of TAU’s Department of Industrial Engineering, in collaboration with Prof. Alex Pentland and Abdullah Almatouq of MIT. ‘And our difficulty determining the reciprocity of friendship significantly limits our ability to engage in cooperative arrangements. We learned that we can’t rely on our instincts or intuition. There must be an objective way to measure these relationships and quantify their impact.’

“The researchers conducted extensive social experiments and analyzed the data from other studies to determine the percentage of reciprocal friendships and their impact on human behavior. The team also examined six friendship surveys from some 600 students in Israel, Europe and the United States to assess friendship levels and expectations of reciprocity.

“They then developed an algorithm that examines several objective features of a perceived friendship (that is, the number of common friends or the total number of friends) and is able to distinguish between the two different kinds of friendship: unidirectional or reciprocal.

‘” Dr. Shmueli says. ‘If you think someone is your friend, you expect him to feel the same way. But in fact that’s not the case — only 50 percent of those polled matched up in the bidirectional friendship category.’

“Why is this important? According to Dr. Shmueli, influence is the name of the game.

“’Reciprocal relationships are important because of social influence,’ says Dr. Shmueli, who utilized the ‘FunFit’ social experiment in the course of the research. ‘In this experiment that analyzes different incentives for exercising, we found that friendship pressure far outweighed money in terms of motivation. We found, not surprisingly, that those pressured by reciprocal friends exercised more and enjoyed greater progress than those with unilateral friendship ties.’”

My Comment: Indeed, we only see ourselves reflected in our environment. Therefore, we need to fix this some how.. On the one hand, we see an incorrect and absolutely false world. On the other hand, we don’t want to correct the incorrect mutual relationships between us, even though it is possible to correct them.

Question: At what point would there be correct assessment of reciprocal friendship?

Answer: This would be when all of us begin to work for closeness between us, without any connection to what is happening between us. This would be when our goal becomes connection between us in the center of the circle in order to attain the next level of development, to rise to the next level of nature, of creation, of formation. Then, we would no longer have any problems.

Question: This is very difficult for people.

Answer: No, we can do this as a “guided tour” on a spiritual roller coaster, and this will be a joy. This is wild spiritual fun. I recommend this to you!

Question: Even the researchers concluded that friendship is a stronger motivation than money. So, the most useful method for attaining results in every area is to perform work together with friends.

Answer: This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah speaks about. It is up to us to work together for the sake of unity. Then, we would have everything, including money, undoubtedly! This is because the upper force that manages everything in our world, including the regulation of all of our commercial problems, only comes down to a place where unity exists.

Question: Does this mean that everything I have will be enough for me?

Answer: Even more than that.[183552]From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 5/11/16

New Life #560 – The Holiday Of The Giving Of The Torah
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

What is the difference between giving the Torah and receiving the Torah, how can one discover the good force inherent in the Torah and why is the general rule of “And you shall love your friend as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), the entire Torah on one leg?

Summary

Giving the Torah and receiving the Torah are two different matters. The Torah is not a book, but a correcting force.

The Torah is the Upper Light, the Light that Reforms, the force that corrects our egoistic nature to love. In the past we used the force of the Torah and there was love among us, but then we were destroyed through unfounded hatred. Today we are not approaching the great general rule in the Torah, “And you shall love your friend as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), at all.

The “Torah of Light” is the upper force that influences us under special conditions and can change our nature. The evil inclination in us is composed of 613 parts; it is up to us to correct them into love. This is what is called Mitzvot (commandments). The more we develop, the more the evil inclination, our egoism, grows. And according to the wisdom of Kabbalah, now is the time for correction.

The evil inclination means that I want to harm others for my own benefit. It is written, “Thou shalt not steal” (Exodus 20:13) and there is a means provided for correction of the human ego, the Torah, which is connection to the concealed force. The Torah is eternal; at every moment it is possible to connect to the good hidden force; we only need to learn how to do this.

The “circle of connection” is a practical tool for summoning the good force into our lives. The wisdom of Kabbalah is a method that teaches us how to use the Torah, the force of Light, the power that is hidden in nature. The effort to maintain the general rule, “And you shall love your friend as yourself” brings this force to dwell among us.

When we were standing at Mount Sinai, there was mutual hatred between us. We wanted to ascend to love, and we received the Torah. In the divisive situation in Israel today, the wisdom of Kabbalah is revealed as the “Torah of Light,” as a means for correction. Specifically, in Egypt, after we discovered the 49 gates of Tuma’a (impurity), which is the summit of separation, the need for the Torah was created. The Torah is given every day; it is possible to connect to the positive force that will build love for others in us.[158750]From KabTV’s “New Life #560 – Holidays and Festivals: The Holiday Of The Giving Of The Torah,” 5/3/15